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Why Your Bounce Rate Average Needs to Stay Low

Website Tips and Tricks

When your website loads 2 seconds slower than usual, your bounce rate increases by more than 100%.

The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors that leave your site without clicking to another page. Every one-page visitor to your website counts as a bounce, regardless of how long they viewed the page.

However, unlike with most other metrics, such as conversion rates, a high bounce rate average indicates something is wrong.

Keep reading to find out the top reasons why you should always strive for a low bounce rate average!

A Low Bounce Rate Improves SEO Efforts

All businesses want to rank high on search engines like Google and Bing. Ranking higher means more web traffic, which ultimately leads to more revenue. As a result, businesses invest heavily in SEO strategies.

However, a high bounce rate can work against this goal. Search engines tend to view sites with high bounce rates as lower quality. Therefore, if you want to avoid getting penalized by search engines, you need to aim for a lower bounce rate.

A High Bounce Rate Might Indicate Poor Mobile Design

While a high bounce rate average is a red flag for search engines, it may also highlight another problem.

More than 50% of Google users avoid recommending a business with a lackluster mobile site. Mobile users who visit your site and leave immediately might be doing so because they find your mobile site design off-putting.

To fix your mobile woes, consider responsive web design. With this type of web design, your site automatically adapts to the screen size of the visitor. Due to a better visual experience, visitors have more incentive to stay on your site.

Website Speed Affects Your Bounce Rate

As discussed earlier, slower sites tend to have higher bounce rates. Visitors become frustrated with sites that don’t load properly, so they seek alternatives. Since they have plenty of alternatives to choose from, they may never come back again.

If you have an issue with the speed of your website, there are several ways you can go about fixing it. For starters, you can crop your images to make them smaller and avoid using TIFF or BMP formats. You can also try minifying your code.

What Constitutes a High Bounce Rate?

The average bounce rate is approximately 40.5%. However, comparing your bounce rate to the worldwide average isn’t very helpful. There are a couple reasons why.

First, some industries have higher bounce rates than others. For instance, retail sites tend to have higher bounce rates than service sites.

Second, bounce rates vary depending on content type as well. For example, if a visitor goes to Slickplan to obtain contact info, they can get everything they’re looking for on only one page. However, a multi-page article on the same site should have a lower bounce rate.

If you need help finding your bounce rate benchmark, use Google Analytics. It allows you to compare your rate to the industry average. Furthermore, segment your data based on content type.

Maintaining a Low Bounce Rate Average

We know that web design and loading speed are both critical for minimizing bounces.

However, even if you take steps to ensure your design and speed are on point, site downtime can still increase your bounces. If your website goes down, visitors can’t load your site. As a result, they’ll leave immediately.

If you want to ensure your website doesn’t stay down for too long, check out our plans!